Damian Thompson is Editor of Telegraph Blogs and a columnist for the Daily Telegraph. He was once described by The Church Times as a "blood-crazed ferret". He is on Twitter as HolySmoke. His latest book is The Fix: How addiction is taking over your world. He also writes about classical music for The Spectator.

The Guardian sticks the knife into Dr Rowan Williams

The Archbishop of Canterbury has been well and truly done over today in a long profile in the Guardian. Its conclusion: Rowan bears the imprint of whoever has last sat on him.

Stephen Bates, the paper's former religion correspondent, lines up Anglicans from every faction in the Church to say, on or off the record, that â€“ even when you take into account the difficulties of his job â€“ Dr Williams has shown himself to lack leadership qualities.

I'd agree with that. Just a day after a widely admired sermon to Synod delegates in York Minster, he made a complete horlicks of the debate over women bishops, impotently intervening to plead for safeguards for traditionalists â€“ safeguards that, if he'd got his act together earlier, he could have pushed through.

An unnamed archbishop tells Bates that Williams has the gifts to be a professor "but not an archbishop". A friend, a "former primate", adds that the man is "exploding with anger … he can hardly bear to hear the names of some of the bishops who are causing him grief". That's potentially a long list, but I'd be surprised if Rochester wasn't on it.

Marilyn McCord Adams, Oxford's Regius Professor of Divinity, says: "He's undermined us big time. He's not a good leader â€“ he'd be better to be what he was before, a bishop in a small diocese." The evangelical theologian Alister McGrath, comparing Williams to King Canute, says that "leadership is about more than finding consensus â€“ you also have to map out the route that you believe to be right."

This is something that the current Archbishop of Canterbury has consistently failed to do. Is it because he lacks the courage of his convictions? Maybe. Friends of Jeffrey John certainly think so. But it could also be because, like a lot of clever men with a high opinion of their ability to see every side of an argument, he doesn't really know what he believes.